We Are His Workmanship

Somebody asked him a strange question at a wedding and he has been chewing on it since.

They had done the usual and he had said what he does, and the woman he was talking to, who was about eighty and had no interest in small talk, said: yes, but what are you.

He laughed. She waited.

And he could not do it. He tried three times. Every attempt came out as a description of what he makes, or of how he approaches making it, or of the sort of maker he is. When he took all of that out there was nothing left in his hands.

He is forty seven.

He told his wife about it in the car and she said something kind and it did not touch it, because the problem was not that he lacked a good answer for a stranger. The problem was that he had looked and there was not one.

He has been looking at old photographs this evening, which he does not usually do. He is trying to find a version of himself that predates the answer.

You may know that question. Not what do you do. What are you, with the doing taken out, and a suspicion that if you took it out there might be nothing standing where you thought you were.

Which side of the sentence you are on

Here is a verse the Holy Spirit uses to stand you somewhere you are not used to standing.

For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them.Ephesians 2:10

We are his workmanship.

You have spent your whole adult life on the maker's side of that word. Workmanship is what comes out of your hands. It is what you are assessed on and what you are proud of and what you have quietly become.

And here the word is used about you, and you are on the other side of it. You are the thing that was made.

That is a strange place to stand for a man like you and it takes a minute. Everything you know about workmanship, you know from the maker's end: the care that goes into it, the decisions nobody sees, the standard held when nobody was checking. Turn all of that round and point it at yourself, and it is being said that you were made like that.

You are a made thing before you are a maker, and that is where the word is pointed in the verse. Ephesians 2:10 calls us his workmanship and puts us on the made side of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man of forty seven stand somewhere he has never stood.

Now the second half, and it is precisely ordered.

Created in Christ Jesus unto good works. The works come after. They are real, they were prepared, and walking in them is a good life. But they are downstream. The workmanship is first and the works are what the workmanship goes and does.

You have had that order inverted for about thirty years, which is why taking the works out left nothing standing. You were standing on the wrong half of the sentence.

You are the workmanship, and the works are what you walk in rather than what you are. The written word puts made before doing and never reverses it, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who told you that the answer to what are you would be a description of your output.

The honest half. I am not going to tell you that what you make does not matter. It does. It is prepared work and it is good and you are right to care about it, and a message that treated your vocation as a distraction would be doing you an injury.

And the eighty year old woman's question will still be hard next time. Thirty years of an inverted order is not corrected in an evening.

There is a part only you can do and it is one sentence and it will feel unnatural. Say who you are with no verb about making in it. Not what you do well. Not how you work. Who you are.